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Episode 324 - Just Another Beylik

May 2, 2025·28 min·2 clips

The Roman Empire is no longer imperial, just clinging to survival in a Turkish-dominated world.

Just another beylik is the jab. The episode starts after the civil wars that followed Andronicus III's death in 1341, when imperial confidence had shrunk into survival. Andronicus had looked active and hopeful. Thirteen years later, Constantinople could no longer defend its provinces or make the surrounding political world listen. John Palaiologos gives the story its human thread. Born in 1332 and only nine when his father died, he spends his teenage years in the capital while civil war tears through the empire around him. The wider story moves into Europe, where church union becomes the price the pontiff wants before backing a campaign to rescue the Romans. The Romans want help first. They hope an ecumenical council can settle the split after aid arrives. The deal never comes together. Then diplomacy turns embarrassing. John leaves his son Manuel as a hostage and heads west, only to be stopped at Vidin on the Danube by Bulgarian officials. The Tsar will not let him pass. Bulgaria is constantly at war with Hungary, so he reads a Roman-Hungarian connection as a threat. John sits stranded for six months. Western crusading energy exists, but much of it has already gone into an Egyptian expedition that does little beyond sacking Alexander. Amadeo VI is the useful exception. Related to John's family and pulled toward crusade, the Count of Savoy gathers fifteen ships and about fifteen hundred soldiers. He rescues the emperor's position, takes Gallipoli from the Turks, then discovers John is still stuck at Vidin. The closing judgement is bleak. After Maritsa and by 1371, the Romans have crossed another threshold, one that matters almost like 1204. Very little about them still looks imperial. John has spent seventeen years watching the Turkish advance from behind Constantinople's walls, and his son will later serve a foreign ruler as an Ottoman vassal. The next question is hard to avoid: how did the Ottomans go from nobodies in the 1290s to near masters of the Balkans within eighty years?

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